During February and March 1974, science fictionwriter Philip K. Dick experienced a series of strangeand exhilarating visions. Almost exactly ten yearsearlier, Dick had first taken LSD, and his perceptionswhile tripping on acid prefigured this later mysticalmid-life crisis. In a 1965 letter to a friend, he enthused about the "joyous coloration, especially pinks and reds,very luminous" and the "great insights into myself"induced by hallucinogenics. A decade later, nowapparently without the aid of illegal drugs, Dick wasagain overwhelmed by an intense pink light, andbelieved that it was transferring information to himat blazing download speeds. "It seized me entirely," helater explained "lifting mefrom the limitations of thespace-time matrix."

Others might look on thisincident as the incipientsign of acute mental dis-order, but Dick had theexact opposite interpretation. "I experienced an invasionof my mind by a transcend-entally rational mind, as if Ihad been insane all my lifeand suddenly I had become sane," he later toldscience fiction writer Charles Platt. Even more striking—or ridiculous, depending on your perspective—Dick was convinced that he had experienced an extraordinary epiphany, rich with theologicalimplications. He had encountered God, or something roughly fitting the description, the deity as dataoverload. Dick started scribbling down jumbled notesand journal entries in an attempt to decipher the'wisdom' handed on to him, and the resultingmanuscript, which he called the Exegesis, eventually amounted to some 8,000 pages.

Inevitably, this life-changing experience impactedDick's science fiction writing, most notably in his autobiographical 1981 novel VALIS—the title anacronym for "Vast Active Living Intelligence System."Sci-fi novels are rarely autobiographical, but VALIS isnot your typical sci-fi book. Indeed, it is the strangest work of genre fiction I've ever read. Even if you'refamiliar with Dick's other major books, nothing inthem prepares you for this one.

Dick appears as two separate characters in VALIS. Heis both Philip K. Dick, a noted science fiction writer,and Horselover Fat, a wreck of a fellow who hasattempted suicide and been institutionalized forpsychiatric evaluation…after having experienced strange visions in March 1974. But are they really two separate protagonists? At one point in VALIS, anothercharacter points out that "'Philip' means 'Horselover' in Greek" and "'Fat' is the German translation of 'Dick'." Thus Horselover Fat equals Philip Dick. At momentsin VALIS, Horselover Fat even disappears back intothe psyche of Philip K. Dick, a development that the author's friends treat as a sign of Dick's return to sanity. But these interludes do not last for long, and Dick'smental disintegration soon manifests itself again as two separate individuals. The result is an unnerving new take on the old meme of the "unreliable narrator"—or whatwe might call, in this instance, the "multiple-personality unreliable narrator(s)."

Despite all the strangeness, Dick's familiar themes cometo the forefront again and again in this book, the same concepts he had been pursuing in his writings duringthe previous three decades. In fact, some surprising convergences can be found between VALIS andDick's long unpublished first novel Gather Yourselves Together, which he had started writing in the late 1940s—the character Carl Fitter in the latter work even keepsa journal akin to Dick's Exegesis. (And the title of thatearly work could serve as an admonition to the late-stage Mr. Dick with his troubling multiple personalities.) Over the course of around 40 books, Dick had contrived many stories and characters, but his chief recurring obsession could be summed in a simple idea, a conceptthat is at the heart of VALIS—and all his other major works—namely that reality isn't really very real.

The number of variations that Dick worked on thistheme is impressive. Things are never what they seemin a Philip K. Dick story. And I don’t mean that thebutler turns out to be the killer or any of those otherplot twists, predictable even in their surprises, that genre fiction has long employed. In Dick's universe, the very fabric of the universe is prone to give away at anymoment. The characters themselves hardly change, but their context is as likely to tear asunder as a wet paperbag soaking in a parking lot puddle.

Sometimes Dick provides a technological reason forthese radical reformulations of reality, but often he justlets them occur unexplained in his stories. For a writer who devoted his career to the sci-fi field, Dick seemed almost perversely unconcerned with explaining the disjunctions that send his characters reeling in confusion into an alternative universe. As a result, his tales often come across more like applied metaphysics than science fiction. And this explains much of the appeal of Dick's storytelling: where other sci-fi authors would blame everything on aliens or weapons, Mr. Dick describessimilar plot twists in terms of transcendent events and personal crises. As a result, he has more in commonwith existential novelists such as Walker Percy orAlbert Camus than with space opera authors like ArthurC. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.

But in VALIS, Dick reveals a very different attitude. He is no longer content to accept these tears in thefabric of reality; he now wants to understand them. With almost desperate intensity he seeks for reasons,and the result is something we never expected fromPhilip K. Dick: a novel of ideas. Sometimes crazy ideas, usually implausible ideas, but ideas nonetheless. Manyof these are taken verbatim from the Exegesis, and Dick even includes an appendix that features a selection ofthese journal entries. They are like a distortion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, as encountered in a nightmare.

During the course of this novel, the narrator explores almost every possible explanation for a universe inwhich different planes of reality exist. He looks to thepre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenidesfor explanations. He considers Jung's theory ofarchetypes. Or does the Buddhist critique of realityhold the answer? He explores the connection betweenthe split in reality and the Yin and Yang of Taoism. He draws on hermetic alchemists, Apollonius of Tyana, Gnosticism, Asklepios, Richard Wagner, the story ofthe Grail. He looks to Elijah. He looks to Christ. He looks everywhere, with intensity and anxiety.

But our narrator also stares into the television set, searching for coded messages from a higher poweramidst commercials and cartoons. One day, a friendtakes him to a motion picture that seems to presentimages connected to Horselover Fat's visions, and this opens up new theories and possibilities. When Dick,Fat and their friends meet up with the rock star whomade the movie, they believe that they have finallyarrived at the brink of an explanation—indeed, at the explanation to end all explanations. Or maybe they'vejust finally met people even crazier than Philip K. Dick.

Eventually Dick offers possible sci-fi solutions to his enigma. The visions may have come from aliens. Or maybe from a new microwave technology that zapsyour brain instead of the baked potato you plan oneating for dinner. But the reader can see that Dick ishardly satisfied with these options. He’s not lookingfor aliens; he's looking for the meaning of life.

There are many strange things about VALIS, but oneof the strangest is the new-found brilliance to Dick'sprose. For all his creativity, Dick often wrote in a cartoonish, pulp-fiction manner—his biographerLawrence Sutin describes it as a "slapdash quality" and notes that it prevents many critics from considering Dickin the same category as Kafka, Calvino and other writers who dealt with similar themes. Even Dick's mostfamous works from the 1960s and 1970s are filled with clumsy passages that seem churned out to meet adeadline, not lay the groundwork for a posthumousliterary reputation. As a result, you typically read this author for his imaginative daring not stylish descriptionsor clever dialogue or poetic metaphors. But in VALIS, Dick actually starts writing at a dazzlingly high level. The coarse pulp-fiction author disappears completelyfrom view and instead we have an edgy prose stylistwhose work can stand comparison with Pynchon and Heller and Vonnegut and Kesey and all those other renegade who redefined American fiction in the 1960sand 1970s.

So, if I can borrow Jonathan Lethem's pun, you reallydon't know dick about Dick until you've read VALIS. I believe it is his finest novel, and the starting point forany reader who wants to see how close sci-fi can get to avant-garde fiction. But the fact that Dick wasn't tryingto conduct an experiment in writing, but was grappling with his own demons and—this is no glib exaggeration—the very meaning of his own life, gives these pages a pathos and power that few other avant-garde novels possess. In short, it all comes together here although,sad to say, it had to come apart for Mr. Dick in orderfor that to happen.